om outside reflected in the soft luster of
her skin as a tint of sunset may be caught by the petals of certain
white flowers.

"I had a reason. It wasn't doing any one any harm," she repeated, "not
even you." In further self-defense she added: "Uncle Emery didn't
disapprove, and I've never told Aunt Zena. But I've always been glad I
went--very."

"Why?"

"Because she's a sort of charge of Uncle Emery's, for one thing--since
you've put her in his care. I help _him_ a little bit. And then the
sister she lives with--you knew we'd got her to live with her sister,
didn't you?--isn't very kind to her. It's just the money. And then," she
continued, the soft color deepening, "I had another reason--more
personal--that I'd rather not say anything about."

"I can't imagine anything in the whole bad business that could be
personal to you."

"No, of course you can't. It's only personal by association--by
imagination, probably." She made nothing clearer by adding: "You know
I'm not really Uncle Emery's niece, or Aunt Zena's."

He nodded.

"I don't know who my mother was. But whoever she was--I'm sorry for
her."

He began to get her idea. "You're probably quite wrong," he said,
kindly; "and until you know you're right I shouldn't let fancies of that
sort run away with me."

"Oh, I don't. And yet you can see that when I meet any one like Maggie
Clare--well, I don't feel superior to her. It's like being a
gipsy--George Eliot's Fedalma, for instance--adopted by a kind family,
but knowing she's a gipsy just the same."

He brought his knowledge of the world to bear on her. "I assure you
you're not in the least like that kind of gipsy."

"Neither was Fedalma like her kind; and yet when she could do something
for them she went to them and did it."

"How old are you?" he said, abruptly, asking the same question which but
a few weeks before Noel Ordway had put to Edith, and in much the same
way.

"We call it twenty-three--because we keep my birthday on the date on
which Uncle Emery and Aunt Zena took me; but I must be nearer
twenty-five."

He looked at her more attentively than he had ever done. She was not
really shy; she wasn't even reserved; but she was repressed--repressed
as any one might be who lived under the weight of Mrs. Bland's
protesting, grudging kindliness. It came back to him now, the tone in
which she had said, a year earlier, that she couldn't be called mother
by a child who didn't belong to her. How that